Old Primordial Soup Is Spoiled
Don’t open it; that can of primordial soup sitting on the shelf for decades is rotten. PhysOrg announced, “New research rejects 80-year theory of ‘primordial soup’ as the origin of life.”
In its place come new theories about tiny chemical cooking pots in the pores of deep-sea vents. Pioneered by Michael Russell (02/15/2008) and others, these scenarios picture energy gradients and concentrating mechanisms that might have gotten life cooking deep below the sea. National Public Radio printed a short synopsis, asking, “Is It Time To Throw Out ‘Primordial Soup’ Theory?”
The article is clear that primordial soup is off the shelf. “Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. “We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all.”
One problem is that there is no energy gradient in such a view: no driving force for chemical reactions. “Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life,” said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist [Institute of Botany III in Dusseldorf]. “But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life.” There goes a ton of expensive soup down the drain. It sure had a lot of sentimental value.
This story should make the righteous angry. For decades – almost a century (more if you consider Darwin’s “warm little pond” story) – the Primordial Soup Myth filled biology textbooks with fallacies. The Miller experiment, with its flasks zapped with electricity, lent itself to visualization, exaggeration and power of suggestion. It became a veritable icon of evolution – a “useful lie” for materialists (05/02/2003).
Lee Strobel was one of countless students swayed by the Primordial Soup Myth, as he recounted in his book and film, The Case for a Creator (watch it on YouTube). This simplistic mythoid, devoid of factoids, has now been destroyed and should be avoided, but it will take an act of Congress, an executive order and a Supreme Court decision to overcome the Law of Inertia for Falsified Theories (01/15/2010).
With the soup gone, would you trust the same materialists to come up with a better dish? Would you dare taste their Thicken Plot Pie? (08/22/2005). Their new story has all the same fallacies as the old one, including the biggest: it doesn’t account for the most important element of all, the origin of genetic information (01/26/2008, and Meyer’s Signature in the Cell).
To dispense with materialistic origin-of-life scenarios, with their “building blocks of lie,” let us propose an alternative experiment that is easily visualized and can even be tested by junior high school students. (This was suggested by Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith.) Take a sardine can. It has ideal conditions for the origin of life, because the little fishies were once alive. It has all the molecules and nutrients life could ever want. Do anything you want with the can, other than puncturing it or breaking its seal. You can heat it, chill it, tap it, spin it, and expose it to electromagnetic fields.
An alternative experiment was suggested by Dr. Jonathan Wells. Take a living cell in a test tube of sterile fluid, and puncture it. Let the cell’s contents ooze out, then cap the tube.* Again, you have all the ingredients for life right there. Wait for life to emerge.
These are the best possible conditions for origin-of-life studies. Let the materialists succeed here before attempting to prove life could have emerged under far less favorable conditions. We suggest it will be a lot like watching the prophets of Baal. Give them time to cut themselves, weep and wail for the god of chance to send the fire of life. Then, send a modern Elijah to show where the true power behind life is to be found. He can insert a little genetic information, a little E. coli into the can perhaps, and like fire from heaven, the can will burst with life. The only step left will be to round up the fakes and deal with them.
*Actually, a variation on this experiment was done by Louis Pasteur in the late 1800s – the famous swan-necked flask experiment that disproved spontaneous generation. Some of his flasks, on display in France, remain sterile to this day, after well over a century, even though open to the air (source: Clermont College). They stand as a testament to the fact that life (containing genetic information), and only life, begets life. If materialists respect empirical evidence, let them stand in silent humility at one of the longest-running experiments in the history of science.